The exaggerated and misjudged nonsense of NLP – as shown in the words of Richard Bandler

I recently read Richard Bandler’s “Make Your Life Great” (2008). It reawakened my frustration with NLP as a whole, and how it preys on a crowd hungry for hope (the customers) or power (the practitioners) to perpetuate its inflated promises and flimsy doctrines. Here’s an example of the kind of bullshit I’m talking about:

“I had one case that was even more bizarre. Somebody had grabbed the victim from behind and covered the victim’s eyes. The police weren’t clear about what happened, so [in hypnosis] I slowed the [mental] movie down, froze it just before the hands touched the victim’s face, and magnified the image. Then I had the victim draw the fingerprint – and the police found the attacker. That’s how precise the mind is. Now I’m not saying that was quick by any means. That took me hours to do. The person concerned was a good hypnotic subject and could also draw pretty well. The image wasn’t perfect by any means, it was only what they call ‘a partial’, but it was enough to get a match” (p230)

Now, I do realize that venting some frustrations against NLP will possibly create a response along the lines of “oh, you must have had a bad experience with it!” or (more cringe-inducing) “you just don’t understand it!” – and I can live with that.

Before we get in to this, I’ll just outline my issues against NLP.

1) NLP over-simplifies the mind and emotional world. NLPer’s will vehemently argue that the mind is simple, that complex and long-standing issues can be quickly solved with a “swish” pattern or anchoring exercise. The only real clear success stories that come from NLP seem to be mild anxiety relief or “phobia cures”. I have no issue with the disociative techniques used for fear/anxiety – its pretty simple stuff – but it does bug me that these anecdotes are embellished and touted to support NLP as a whole, masking the bigger magnitude of false promises, exaggerations and unsubstantiated hype. Ultimately, I’m concerned that people with genuine issues, who are exposed to an NLPer, won’t receive the requisite skill and resources they need. Worse, they may lose hope, or feel unlistened to and taken advantage of. Of course there will be people who do benefit, and I’m not knocking that – but the practitioners who dovetail NLP techniques with their own empathy/skills/understanding/resources are far outweighed by those who use inflated self-worth as a superficial therapeutic tool.

2) The simpler, more widely-known techniques of “mirroring/matching” and usage of eye-access cues seem to be designed purely for people who have no empathy/rapport skills of their own but a yearning for power and control. Sociopaths, basically. In fact, the overall simplicity of the techniques and patterns and its strange lack of emotional awareness and empathy seems to assume that everyone is sociopathic. This is no suprise, as its a natural human tendency to assume that others are as we are. Which makes more sense, because, Bandler was diagnosed as a sociopath, was a cocaine addict, and was also accused of murdering a prostitute when there was only one other guy in the house at the time (they each accused the other and were acquitted):

He was diagnosed as a sociopath. “And, yeah, I am a little sociopathic. But my illusions were so powerful, they became real – and not just to me.” Jon Ronson talking to Bandler, The Guardian – more of that later.

3) It seems to be defensively anti-evidence. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that mirroring/matching, primary representation systems (visual/auditory etc) embedded cues and eye-accessing cues have no actual validity. But that doesn’t stop this stuff being used to create placebo-driven compliance-responsive situations, hype and endless training circle-jerks where its sold as a “powerful ability to control people!” or whatever.

This guy said it better:

“The practitioners have been ‘programmed’ to believe the ‘programme’, giving them the right to ‘programme’ others. That’s what cults do. Ever criticised NLP in front of a NLP practitioner? Like all fundamentalists they respond with the full force of the fanatic.” (Donald Clark)

richard-bandler-quotes“Make Your Life Great is basically like “NLP in a book” – it perfectly encapsulates everything annoying and wrong about NLP. All the contradictions, exaggerations, and over-blown generalised nonsense that fuels the big NLP circle-jerk, where the only outcome seems to be endless hype, unverified miraculous anecdotes, and trainers being trained to train more trainers in a big money-spinning carousel of bullshit.

Later, you’ll find out the answer to…

“One of the best ways of getting over an unhappy past and guaranteeing a happy and successful future is to…”

So read on, because you’ll absolutely want to know this incredible secret to all your problems, from Bandler himself.

I also want to show a few more Richard Bandler quotes straight from the book.

But first, lets have a look at that hugely misleading front cover.

It doesn’t know its audience, and doesn’t care

richard-bandler-make-your-life-greatYou would think that this was a book called Make Your Life Great – and therefore a self-help book aimed at the lay person, right? Because look – there’s that big, generic, hope-infused catch-all title so beloved of mass marketed self help books.

Yet, technically “Make Your Life Great” is actually only the subtitle – the actual title is “Richard Bandler’s Guide To Trance-Formation”. And its actually more aimed at therapists, because the majority of the book is dedicated to the most superficial therapy training you could imagine.
Which in itself is weird – any genuine therapist who thinks they benefit from this book isn’t competent enough in the first place to be working with clients. And it’s useless for the lay person. NLP prides itself on effective communication and efficiency – yet the book willfully throws itself at the wrong crowd anyway, simply to sell more copies and make more money.

“The book is less about helping yourself and more about working on others (for example, the section called ‘Patterns of Induction’ is about how to induce hypnotic trance using people’s own “sub-modalities”, whilst Section 4 is entitled ‘Client Sessions’).” (Amazon).

paul-mckenna-i-can-make-you-richThen there’s the Paul McKenna quote – “Use this amazing book to unleash your power and redesign your destiny”. Pure generic waffle that’s slapped on by McKenna because they’re business partners and cross-sell each others products. Their books even look the same.

Its ironically very anti-therapy

Bandler seems to delight in criticizing psychotherapy, therapy and counselors as a whole, which I find strange considering that the core of NLP developed from studying psychotherapists.

“Therapists believed insight was the magic key to change. However, years and years of psychoanalysis didn’t seem to do much more than give people reasons to stay stuck in their old ways” (page xviii)

“That’s why hypnosis was primarily used for simple things, such as getting people to lose weight and quit smoking. Therapists didn’t really have the tools for more complex problems” (p108)

This makes no sense whatsoever. Hypnotherapy primarily bloomed in response for a need for rapid pain relief, for amputations and for resolving post-war neuroses – but even so, weight loss and smoking are anything but simple. Not if they’re going to be solved for the long-term. They both deal with self-image, identity, negative beliefs and addiction. Added to that, what exactly does “Therapists didn’t really have the tools for more complex problems” mean? Is he seriously suggesting that no one with a complex problem was ever helped?

“I once spent a whole winter house-sitting for a psychiatrist friend, and out of sheer boredom I read every book he had. The hundreds of texts by all these important doctors and professors could tell you everything you needed to know about how people got sick or stuck – but not one of them had even the glimmer of an idea of how to help them get better. It didn’t even occur to them that it might be a useful direction to follow.” (p21, emphasis mine)

Really Richard? Maybe the guy just had the wrong books, because later, Bandler writes this:

“When Gregory Bateson first told me about Milton, I knew nothing. So I gathered his collected works, all his journal articles, everything I could find written by him, and read it all. I was intrigued by Milton’s claims, so I went out and got every book – literally hundreds of books – about hypnosis and read them all. I tried out everything, a lot of it on a neighbor I had. She was agoraphobic and had allergies and all sorts of things wrong, and we fixed them all. (p39, emphasis mine)

Do these two quotes seem a little biased, distorted and generalized to you? You know, like the attitudes he claims to “fix” in people.

Anything outside of NLP gets criticized – he even finds a way to trivialize eastern approaches and imply doubt on the age-old strengths of meditation:

“I’ve studied many different kinds of meditation in many different countries. I’ve been to hundreds of sacred temples and spoken to every guru I could find. Their methods might have differed, by they all said more or less the same thing: learn to meditate and practice it regularly and your problems would float away. I don’t think this is unrealistic, however far-fetched some people might think it is” (p160)

Or how about this one…

“The patterns presented here are, as the title suggests, among the most transformative ever created. They have been tested over more than four decades in virtually every country in the world, and their mastery will open more doors for you than any number of gurus or therapists” (p211)

The lack of evidence is weirdly ignored

So if he’s going to criticize hundreds of psychotherapy books and therapy in general, evidence for NLP must be pretty spectacular, right?

“The idea that we are all victims of past experiences is an attractive one to many psychoanalysts and counselors. But as far as I know, there is not a single shred of evidence that this always has to be the case.” (p192)

I see! So where’s the single shred of evidence for NLP?

“Academics sometimes challenge me for something they call “evidence”. They want to know the theory behind what I do; they want me to explain it, preferably with the appropriate research references. I’ve even had people ask for the correct citations for things that I’ve made up.”

So how does he respond to this?

“The way I see it, its not my job to prove, or even understand, everything about the workings of the mind. I’m not too interested in why something should work. I only want to know how…”

…and that’s all he has to say about that.

This is general problem of the NLP movement – the moment you mention evidence or research, the die-hard NLPers become immensely defensive, hostile, and over-generalize any anecdotal evidence to support their claims. The problem with that mindset is that its all too easy to remember the bits that work, and forget (or distort, embellish) the bits that don’t, until you have no clue what you’re actually doing. Its strange that Bandler actually encourages the mindset of “don’t test your work”.

“I don’t have clients who come back” (p216)

Hmm. Slightly ambiguous as to what that could actually mean.

richard-bandler-quotes-2For a long time I’ve seen compliance as a huge contributing factor to NLP methods, and its evident in Bandler’s videos. I’ve seen a practitioner do anchoring completely wrong – yet get a suggestible woman believing its worked. In that instance, its clearly the attention and expectancy/pressure that was influencing the result – not the technique. If this is possible (and it clearly is because the placebo effect is powerful), then whats actually going on in these situations is very different from what NLPers would claim is going on. I strongly suspect that McKenna/Bandler know that, because by now they’re far more interested in hype, branding/marketing and income, but most of the trainees have no idea about such possibilities. Worse, they willfully ignore them. The end result of this is that people aren’t really being helped or changed at all – only superficially, and only temporarily.

Of course there will be some who claim they are changed, or their clients changed, because of NLP. But the problem here is that such anecdotal evidence excludes the many others who didn’t. The usual statistical errors are used to help it hide away behind a blanket of anecdotes (the plural of which does not equal “data”).

Lets take a look at some of those anecdotes.

Some of Richard Bandler’s exaggerated anecdotes

“One young girl even speeded up the way her eyes worked, but not the rest of her, so she could see the world in slow motion. Without any training at all, she was able to run rings around a martial artist friend of mine. From her point of view, everything was slowed all the way down. To the observer, she was moving twice as fast as the other guy” (p19)

“I have had people regress to childhood, sitting on a parent’s knee, and being able to recall every word of a book they last saw forty years ago, before they even learned to read” (p70)

“So I told him to look at the table, close his eyes, and count to four, and when he opened his eyes he’d see something that surprised him – a very vivid picture in front of him on the table. He closed his eyes and started counting. As he was doing that, I slid across a picture of the cover of one of my books that I happened to have with me. He opened his eyes, saw the picture, and I immediately told him to close them again. I slipped the picture back under the table, then told him to open his eyes, look to his side, and see the six-foot pink French poodle. He opened his eyes – and there it was: a giant, pink poodle. He was fascinated.” (p94)

“I have a letter framed and hanging on the wall of my office that says I’m ‘the best hypnotist in the world’. I know that every person who comes in to make some changes will read the letter. Some of them just sit down after that and go straight down into trance before I say anything” (p118)

“How do you know how to get what you see down on your canvas?” He thought a bit and said “Well, as I’m looking at the scene I want to paint, I feel this wire in my mind that goes from my brush to the scene outside, and, as I mentally trace the details of the scene, the wire moves my hand in the same way and I can feel the marks I see on my canvas are right”. Since then, I’ve taught this strategy to hundreds of people, all of whom believed they couldn’t draw or paint and now are very competent and enthusiastic artists. (p72)

“I went into schools where kids couldn’t spell and taught them to make pictures of the words and copy them down. Suddenly, bad spellers became good spellers” (p73)

“I can age-regress people with hypnosis, so they’ll remember every phone number they ever had – and they do it in reverse order” (p205)

“They said ‘this woman is not hypnotizable’. I looked at her and said ‘You can’t be hypnotized?’ and her pupils dilated and she literally said, in a monotone, ‘I-cannot-be-hypnotized’, in exactly the manner and tone of voice of someone carrying out a posthypnotic suggestion. I brought her on the stage and demonstrated every hypnotic phenomenon I could think of with her. I turned to the psychiatrists and said ‘Well, I guess you were wrong’. They said ‘Uh… it’s probably contextual’” (p97)

“One of my clients was sent to me by the court because he attacked somebody in public in a blind rage. He said ‘the guy stepped on my foot, and I just started hitting him’. He went to therapy, and the therapist told him that he had a ‘hot button’. He explained once you have a hot button, there was nothing you could do about it. Of course, my subject knew he was going to end up in prison. I thought ‘Cool!’ I knew exactly what I had to do. I put him in a deep trance, then gave him a posthypnotic suggestion. As I brought him out, I attached his hot button to my cool button. Once I’d attached the two buttons, I pushed the hot button and the cool button triggered. And then I stomped on his foot. He just smiled and laughed and relaxed” (p183)

“I hypnotized him and made cigarettes taste like cod liver oil, that they were the most disgusting things in the world, and he’d never want to smoke one again. He came back the next week, and hadn’t smoked a single cigarette. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a bottle of cod liver oil and took a swig.” (p217)

“I was in a restaurant, listening to a couple at the next table having a fight. The man said something really nice – obviously wanting to make peace with his partner – and she snapped back: “Oh, you’re just saying that to make me feel better!” So I leaned over and said: “Yeah, he’s really bad that way. Imagine wanting to make the woman he loves feel good.” For a moment, they were both stunned. Then they laughed and started to talk to each other in a much nicer way” (p27)

Some random Bandler delusions of grandeur

“I pioneered the process of unconscious installation, which, among all the other techniques of multilevel communication too numerous to go into here…” (p174)

“Back in the days when we still used audiotapes, every company in the field of psychology products contacted me at one time or another to ask me to make a stress-reduction tape. I’d say ‘can’t we make one so that people don’t go into a stress state in the first place?’ and the response every time was, ‘No, everybody has to go into stress’” (p183)

“I think I’ve probably discovered more than any living person how to get rid of fear. I doubt whether there’s anybody who has rid people of as much fear on this planet as I have” (p200)

“Even though I have to travel thousands of miles by air for my work, I don’t particularly enjoy flying. So, the moment I board an airplane, I got into a deep trance, go inside, and play in the playground in my head. There’s a place that’s full of all the things I own on the outside world, as well as a lot more wonderful creations. I have a TV set that lets me play back old programs when I feel like seeing those again. I have the world’s best stereo system inside my mind. I also have a spare orchestra and a choir, and I can have them sing and play anything I want” (p112)

Does Bandler even understand therapy?

He seems conflicted about his understanding of hypnosis:

“Fritz’s work was very hypnotic too. Telling clients to hallucinate dead relatives in empty chairs – what is that if it isn’t deep trance hypnosis?” (p41)

“At some level or other, everything is hypnosis” (p2, emphasis mine)

But then later changes his mind:

“The Hypnotist goes through a series of ‘tests’ – commands to lift one arm, clasp the hands and be unable to pull them apart, and so on. This is not hypnosis. This is simply to see which people will follow orders” (p118, emphasis mine)

So… there is something that isn’t hypnosis? Make your mind up.

And what about his technique in seminars, where he creates little moments of compliance from people on the stage, but frames it to appear like hypnosis?

People are not simply in or out of trance but are moving from one trance to another” (p2)

Then later…

“I know how these things change as people go into trance. As people begin to alter their state, their lower lips fill up with blood, the pores become smaller, and the pupils dilate” (p152)

What? Their pores become smaller?

“Neural scanning lets us know that when people go into hypnotic trance, real changes take place in their brains.” (p157)

Again, make your mind up – do people go in and out of trance, or don’t they?

Here’s another:

“Virginia Satir said ‘The strongest instinct is to keep things familiar’. She was right” (p201)

Then…

“People don’t stay the same. People either get better or they get worse” (p204)

So – keeping things familiar, or changing?

“I really want people to have control. Milton wanted them to just respond. If people were depressed he wanted them to go into a state where they were more optimistic. He didn’t really want them to have conscious control” (p156)

Then…

“If people come in and say they’re depressed, I want them laughing their asses off as quickly as possible, so, after that, every time they think about being depressed they burst out laughing” (p38)

So how is that giving them control, Richard? Because it sounds like another (exaggerated, bullshit) version of what you just criticized in Milton.

“We can set things up so that one altered state immediately triggers another, more desirable, altered state” (p184)

Wait – doesn’t “immediately triggering” contradict this: “I really want people to have control. Milton wanted them to just respond“.

Other Richard Bandler quotes on therapy in general:

“You don’t want to have rapport with paranoid schizophrenics, for example. I certainly don’t. I scare the hell out of them so they want to change” (p143)

“Most of what I’ve accomplished I’ve done by acting crazy” (p201)

“When we want to produce really powerful change, we reformat the brain in much the way information is reformatted in a computer” (p199)

This next one is probably the most misguided, incorrect and stupid idea regarding therapy I have read:

“I find it very useful to give people amnesia for bad experiences that are still destroying their lives. If they didn’t remember it happening, they can’t keep going over what it was like and making themselves feel terrible” (p227)

Lets just see that from another angle – using a quote from Jon Ronson’s Guardian article on Richard Bandler:

“My mother was always out working, and my father was violent and dangerous.” He pauses. “Well, my first father was gone by the time I was five, and he was very violent. My mother later married a guy who was a drunk and a prize fighter in the navy. He was very violent – broke a lot of my bones. But in the end I won.”

“How?” I ask, expecting him to say something like, “Look at me now, I’m getting driven around in a Bentley.”

But instead he says, “I electrocuted him.”

“Really?” I say.

“I didn’t kill him,” he says, “but I could have.”

“How did you electrocute him?” I ask.

“I waited until it was raining,” he says. “I got a wire-mesh doormat. I stripped a lamp cord, put it underneath the doormat, put the other end in the keyhole and put my hand on the switch. When the key went in, I clicked the switch. There was a loud scream. He went over the railing. Six months in hospital.”

“How old were you?” I ask.

“Ten,” he says.

I remember his advice for people who suffered childhood abuse: “Just forget about it.” Tell the voices to “shut the fuck up”. Is NLP Bandler’s way of avoiding confronting the demons of his past? Or perhaps it’s the opposite – why else would he spend his life mapping the crazy ways people behave, if not to try and understand the senselessness of his own childhood? I ask him this. He shrugs, then replies, “I don’t think too much about my childhood. I just left it behind me. I moved on.”

The family moved to California, where Bandler became “a juvenile delinquent. Then I discovered it wasn’t the Harley that was scaring people. It was the look in the eye.”

He was diagnosed as a sociopath. “And, yeah, I am a little sociopathic. But my illusions were so powerful, they became real – and not just to me.”

Hmm.

Ok, on with more quotes from his book:

“Most therapies try to find ways of getting people to replace their thoughts, feelings and memories with new and more appropriate patterns.”

Err wait, isn’t that what NLP also does?

“The problem with this approach is that its not exactly how the human brain works. What I try to do is to get people back to a point before they built the generalisations that didn’t work, and then put in new generalisations to override the old ones. This works because the human brain operates by a kind of push-down storage, rather like the sort you see in cafeterias, where plates are stored by pushing them down into a spring-loaded compartment. ” (p204)

Oh well I guess that clears that up then. I always wondered how the brain works.

“Abreaction happens because some people have never had the experience of truly relaxing, and the experience is so unfamiliar it scares them” (p181)

Relaxed… and scared? Always good to just assume an understanding of abreactions.

“Procrastination is not a psychological problem; it’s just a matter of mental organization” (p76)

“I’ve never met a depressed person who can remember a time when he was really happy” (p26)

“If people have choices, they’ll always make the best one” (p157)

Because no one ever made a bad choice, ever.

His neuroscience also seems a bit sketchy to say the very least:

“Now, of course, we know that in the motor cortex, the wiring for the muscles of the nose and the genitals are right next to each other. If you move your nose, typically your genitals will move; typically, if you flare your nostrils or move the nose up and down, you stimulate your genitals” (p41)

“I got to use one of the early MRI machines on- of all people- claustrophobics. I had to duct tape them down to get them to go inside… One hemisphere almost totally shut down, while the other went into overdrive, accompanied by accelerated heart rate and breathing. But then, when I took them through the original treatment that I developed many years ago and put them back in the machine, every single one of them was calm, while their scans showed that both hemispheres of their brains had become active. This finding told me that they made physiological, neurological, chemical and mental changes that could stay with them for the rest of their lives” (p130)

Here’s that secret I promised you earlier…

“One of the best ways of getting over an unhappy past and guaranteeing a happy and successful future is to practice making yourself feel better for no particular reason.” (p190)

Well, there’s the secret to getting over an unhappy past and guaranteeing a happy and successful future guys. Feel better for no particular reason.

Some more general Bandler waffle and bollocks

“Its interesting how certain people can be about their doubt. As soon as you understand that even to have doubt, they have to have certainty, then you can find out what they’re certain about and start to give them doubt about their limitations and certainty about the things they want” (p87)

“Robert Anton Wilson, an old friend of mine, used to recite poetry to me for hours. When I asked him how he memorized it all, he said “Well, I have it on a really big [imaginary] page, and I just read it off.” As he spoke, Bob would move his head from one side to the other to “read” the sentences written there. Because the picture he created in his mind was very big, twenty feet high and twenty feet across, with great big letters on it, it contained a lot of information. It was easy to read and easy to remember.” (p73)

“Later, I got to do things my way. As a person who was still left-handed, I reversed all the doors in my house to make things easier for myself. Everywhere else, the front door opened inward. Mine opened outward; it just felt better than way. Friends of mine would come along, try to get in, then say “Hey, your door’s jammed”. I’d come along, open it the other way. Their motor programs just couldn’t cope with an exception to a generalization about the way doors “should” be.” (p28)

“As technology and self-development come together, we will find new ways that will allow us to speed up our own evolution even more rapidly. But until this happens, the best means to accomplish all this is your sensory system – especially your ability to observe” (p158)

Where NLP gets a bit snake-oily and silly

Bandler and Grinder started out with the idea of modelling – find someone successful in their field, analyse what they do, do it, emulate their success. They analysed the work of Milton Erickson, Virginia Satir, and Fritz Perls. Its important to remember that the techniques existed to begin with. Gil Boyne was using “NLP” (in terms of anchoring, reframing, pacing, meta-model questioning) before NLP was even developed. Leslie Weatherhead was writing about “sub-modalities” as early as the 1930s.

So this led to the “Milton model”, a system of artfully vague and ambiguous or suggestive language patterns, commonly utilised for indirect hypnosis. The flip side of the Milton model is the meta-model, where the vagueness and ambiguity in someone else’s language is analysed and completed (i.e. clarified, the gaps filled in) through incisive questioning.

The implication is that something that someone has taken decades of experience to become expert at, can be replicated with some analysis and imitation. Just copy what they do – get the same results.

Does this seem fair and reasonable to you?

Maybe it is – maybe it *can* work in certain contexts, by learning little techniques or mental algorhythms that people follow.

But there is a flaw with this idea – which explains why people leaning the Milton model are never going to be as effective as Erickson, and are foolish for trying (and unethical for claiming as such).

The flaw is that modelling doesn’t account for understanding or wisdom, which are required to make expert decisions at the right time.

Now – you might argue that the intention wasn’t to use the Milton model to perform therapy, but merely to hypnotise in the way that Erickson did. Again though, there is a huge depth of understanding missing from the Milton model, an understanding about hypnosis which Erickson clearly had. There is something between the lines, something so subtle, that isn’t captured in the Milton model. Concepts like true expectation, empathy, emotional understanding, awareness of the unconscious mind, belief and wisdom which practitioners of NLP rarely seem to exhibit.

The analogy would be modelling Picasso. You could analyse how he holds his brush, makes strokes, the colours he uses, the canvas. But you aren’t going to paint a Picasso with that knowledge. There is something inherent in people, a hidden layer of complexity, that can’t be accessed by modelling.

Yet that’s exactly the conceited goal that Bandler has with his trainers – to turn trainees into therapeutic “Picasso’s”.

He succeeds to the extent that he’s able to brainwash and encourage them towards an inflated sense of self-worth, couple with a biased and negligent way of evaluating results.

They then do become “Picasso’s” – in their own heads – because they believe they are. They’re then able to “sell” and persuade this idea to their “clients”, who don’t know any better.

Placebo (i.e. some attention, listening and vacuous techniques) and compliance allows for positive results about 30% of the time – which is enough to gather enough of those positive anecdotes and exaggerate them. Just ignore the other times.

Assume, just like Bandler that if someone doesn’t come back – that they’re cured, right?

A fitting ending

So here’s the last paragraph from Bandler’s book.

“There are many people who have the same religious beliefs but behave totally differently. There are Muslims who are very peaceful people and there are Muslims who are murderers. There are Christians who are murderers and Christians who are pascifists. It has nothing to do with which God you believe in. Its about how you build your beliefs to guide your behaviour. The more we get people to understand this…”

Are you excited as to where this is going?

…the less they’re going to build beliefs that require them to kill other people – and I think that’s ultimately a very important thing”. (p299)

There you have it then – the overall conclusion from “Make Your Life Great” is that Bandler thinks its ultimately very important that you don’t kill people.

Bandler – the once diagnosed sociopath, cocaine addict and accused of First Degree murder of a prostitute in her house with her drug dealer.


Comments

One response to “The exaggerated and misjudged nonsense of NLP – as shown in the words of Richard Bandler”

  1. Just came across your website when googling for self-hypnosis. Glad I found it, some quality material here.

    I also agree with your take on “NLP”. I have been looking at this recently and I have to say it seems to me to be a kind of modern day quackery, sort of astrology for business therapists. This eye gaze thing especially I think is hilarious, pure quackery. Plus this “modelling” which far as I can make out is just a fancy word for mirroring another person’s body language, eye gaze and gestures.

    But the thing I dislike most about it are the people who are into “NLP”. It has the features of yet another cult – you are either a dedicated follower, or else are beyond the pale. I don’t hold with cults. This one especially seems to be a commercial marketing based cult.

    One question, I’ve noticed with some presenters at business presentations etc that they ask a question of the audience, “hands up all those who also find/have experienced/done whatever..” and the presenter puts his own hand right up… is that an “NLP technique”? I guess it’s harmless, its to try and get the audience to copy it and take part in the action. I just notice a lot of people do it.

    Anyway, I found the self-hypnosis and hypnosis pages useful, great material.

    Kevin

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